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APRA is a not-for-profit organisation which prides itself on helping the community at no cost. If we have helped you, a friend or a family member and you wish to make a donation, please do so. We rely on the kindness of the community to keep our organisation going so why not make a small donation today?

The long-term developmental aim of APRA is to become an officially recognized research institute, as recognised by the Victorian and Australian Government. This requires numerous steps include the establishment an independent board of advisors to oversee both the validity of projects undertaken by us as well as disbursement of grant finances for these projects.

Why is this important?

Raising APRA to the level of a government recognized research institute has great implications on our ability to publish our findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals – the predominant means of disseminating information to the scientific community. The reason for this being important is fundamentally embedded in the issue of ethics and ethically directed research. Any research conducted on or with humans requires ethical approval (from the scientific board), before it can be accepted by the scientific community. If APRA conducts experiments on individuals who claim certain abilities (eg. induce out-of-body experiences at will), without the prior approval by a government approved scientific board of ethics, the data will not be accepted by the scientific community. This does not mean that our investigations have been unethical in any way, only that it has not been officially acknowledged or documented. In fact we could have exercised a level of ethics far greater than would necessarily be required, but without independent verification and approval our data would be discarded.

This is partly the reason why our focus currently rests on ghost and haunting activity – we don’t require ethics to investigate ghosts or ”empty” houses. However during our transition period we are still interested in all phenomena that cross our desk, and conducting experiments in the form of pilot studies (introductory studies) provide invaluable data for directing larger scale and more costly research projects.